Dog Park to Mountain Goats

The second of three catch up posts of games I played for the first time in early 2025. The post stretches in alphabetical order from Dog Park to Mountain Goats, but there’s no other animal related link between these games.

Dog Park

A game of taking different sorts of dogs for walks and collecting different treats that allow you to entice more dogs in to take for walks. It was fun and I’d happily play again but the theme seemed to contribute most of the fun rather than the mechanics.

Exit: The Game – The Forbidden Castle

We didn’t finish this as the group playing were unsure about destroying the game. I’ve previously played other Exit games and enjoyed them but this one didn’t work for this group. (We played Unlock, another escape room game that doesn’t involve destroying the components to play, in the same session and enjoyed that more.)

Finspan

Third of the -span games. I like Wingspan just fine, but liked Wyrmspan a lot more because it was a bit less random. This is supposedly simpler but after losing it three times I’m not sure I find it simpler. I like the top to bottom diving but other things didn’t really gel for me. In the other games you are very limited as to the cards in your hand and a lot of the game is in keeping only the best ones. In Finspan you have a big hand and can get cards back from your own discard pile and that felt like too many things to keep track of to me. Too big an optimisation problem. I don’t doubt I’ll play this some more as it’s the kind of reasonably quick but still strategic game that my current play groups like and I couldn’t say I didn’t enjoy it, but I don’t think I really like it.

Fjords

I think my friends thumbs tell you what we thought of this game. First you lay the terrain tiles and add some houses to them and then you play a second game of grabbing territory from the houses you placed. The problem was that the terrain tile matching failed a lot of the time. We had to redraw tiles numerous times until we found one that was placeable which was both tedious and made you feel like you weren’t really making any decisions. Plus it was obvious who had placed their houses better to win the territory grab before we started. Not recommended.

Galactic Cruise

A massive Kickstarter game that I backed last year. I don’t back many Kickstarters and think the system is abused by some companies (not the company that produced this one) but I have found that I enjoy all the anticipation and the insights into the manufacturing and shipping processes that you get and like to back the odd project from time to time. I know a lot of people struggle not to kickstart everything but I really have the opposite problem; I find it pretty easy to find reasons to reject backing projects. This one happened to seek funding at a time I was amenable to handing it out and the theme and enthusiasm of the creators pulled me in as much as the report of the gameplay being pretty good.

So I was very much ready to enjoy this when the huge box arrived and am very biased towards liking it, but I think I do. The components are great, probably the best punchboards I’ve ever punched and some lovely chunks of brightly coloured wood. I got the deluxe components upgrade and the money tokens are ridiculously nice. I enjoyed the gameplay too, but I’ve seen so much of it before I played that I don’t really have a first impression of it to record. I didn’t really enjoy teaching it but need to do it some more so that I can have more people who already know the game to play with!

Gloomies

A family weight game from Ravensburger that looks like someone at that company paid attention to other games and decided to make a game that looks nice. You play as flower planting and harvesting aliens for some reason that I didn’t quite grok but it’s very pretty. There’s a nice mechanic where the first half of the game puts the pieces on the board and the second half clears them off but really the gameplay is strictly just ok. I felt it could have done with changes to the scoring for a two player game.

Last Light

But this is the game that really is at the top of its “over the top component” game. Yet when I saw the name of the game on this list I had to go and find my photo to remember what game it was so it didn’t actually win at being memorable at all. Each player explores a solar system of planets on a nice rotating board, so where you are trying to go may rotate away from you before you get there. As I remember it the game played pretty quickly, was reasonable fun, but left me with no desire to try it again other than to ogle at the shiny planets.

Leaf

A tile laying game with the twist that the tiles are leaf shaped and you have to match the tips to be able to carry out different actions. Interesting idea but not really interesting enough as a game.

Mountain Goats

Roll the dice and split them how you like to get your goats to the top of the mountain where the points are, without getting pushed down into the valley by the other goats. Obviously gentle fun and not a big strategy game. It maybe ran a bit long for my liking but I’d have no objection to filling time in with it again.